THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING : Tuesday 6th September 2022.

I saw the M Rated 'THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING' at my local independent movie theatre this week. This dark fantasy film is Co-Written for the screen, Co-Produced and Directed by George Miller, whose previous feature film making credits include his 1979 debut with 'Mad Max', then 'Mad Max 2', 'Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome', 'The Witches of Eastwick', 'Lorenzo's Oil', 'Babe : Pig in the City', 'Happy Feet' and 'Happy Feet Two', with 'Mad Max : Fury Road' his most recent offering before this one, and with the 'Mad Max' spin-off 'Furiosa' currently filming and due for a 2024 release. This film is based on the 1994 short story by A.S.Byatt titled 'The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye'. It saw its World Premiere showcasing at this years Cannes Film Festival in late May, was released in the US on 26th August, here in Australia on 1st September, cost US$60M to produce, has so far earned back US$9M and has garnered generally positive reviews from critics.

The film introduces us to a storyteller, narrativist and scholar Dr. Alithea Bonnie (Tilda Swinton), who by her own admission is a lonely soul, perfectly comfortable in her our company and who has no parents, no siblings and no husband (although she once did have, but he left her for a more outgoing model). Once or twice a year she travels with her work to places like China, Japan and on this occasion to Turkey to speak at a conference. She also suffers from hallucinations of demonic beings - one of which manifests itself to her while she's up on stage addressing the audience at the conference. She passes out, but quickly recovers and tells her good friend and colleague that it's nothing to worry about. Later that same afternoon, she is out shopping at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul and she purchases a small ornate bottle with distinctive blue markings that captured her interest. I'm sure it has an interesting story to tell she says to the shopkeeper as he carefully wraps the bottle in tissue paper. 

The next morning at her hotel having just stepped out of the shower and ordered room service breakfast she sets about cleaning the bottle with her electric toothbrush and dislodges the glass stopper unleashing a Djinn (Idris Elba) that was trapped within it. Djinn offers to grant Alithea three wishes if they are her heart’s desire, but Alithea argues that because she's a scholar of story and mythology, she knows all the cautionary tales of wishes gone wrong, and accuses Djinn of being a trickster. 

The Djinn takes umbrage at the accusations and proceeds to tell her three tales of his past and how he ended up trapped in the bottle on three separate occasions lasting some three thousand years. The Djinn recounts his story of the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), the most beautiful woman in the whole world, his cousin and lover, being wooed by King Solomon (Nicolas Mouawad), who imprisons the Djinn in a bottle so that he can have Sheba for himself. 

The Djinn's second story surrounds Gulten (Ece Yuksel), a young concubine in the palace of Suleiman the Magnificent (Lachy Hulme). After finding the Djinn's bottle, Gulten wishes for Suleiman's son, Mustafa (Matteo Bocelli), to fall in love with her and subsequently wishes to bear his child. However, Mustafa is murdered by his paranoid father, causing Gulten to hide the Djinn's bottle under a heavy flagstone and flee. Despite the Djinn’s attempts to pursue and save her, the pregnant Gulten is also killed on Suleiman’s orders before she is able to make her final wish. The Djinn wanders around the royal palace for over one hundred years, invisible and intangible due to the bottle remaining hidden and out of sight. 

Meanwhile, the bottle is eventually found by royal brothers Murad IV (Kaan Gulder) and Ibrahim (Hugo Vella), but as they are young children they are unable to lift the heavy flagstone. Some twenty years later Murad IV goes into war, where he becomes a vicious and ruthless ruler, and later dies a lonely man from alcoholism. Ibrahim reluctantly becomes the new sultan and finds himself entangled with a bevvy of obese concubines, including Sugar Lump (Anna Adams), who falls backwards onto the flagstone crushing it beneath her weight and manages to retrieve the bottle. The Djinn appears to her and desperately begs her to make a wish but Sugar Lump, scared and confused, wishes for the Djinn to return to his bottle and for the bottle to be thrown into the sea, which it is.

In the Djinn's final story, he tells of Zefir (Burcu Golgedar), the young wife of an older Turkish merchant, who is gifted the bottle after it is recovered during the mid-19th Century. Zefir is intelligent enough in her own right but wishes for knowledge, which the Djinn grants in the form of literature on mathematics, the sciences, history, astrology and astronomy and her second wish to understand the world as djinns do. Despite the Djinn's growing feelings toward Zefir and the fact she is now pregnant with his child, in time she becomes increasingly hemmed in by his presence and her newfound knowledge. The Djinn offers to reside in his bottle whenever she wishes, but Zefir wishes to forget she ever met the Djinn, so imprisoning him once again.

The Djinn's final story moves Alithea to the point where she wishes for Djinn and herself to fall in love. The next day Alithea must return home to London and so she and the Djinn board a flight with the Djinn residing temporarily in a crystal salt shaker. One day, Alithea returns home and discovers that the Djinn is gradually becoming weaker due to the effects of being out of his bottle for a prolonged period of time and the apparent effects of modern telecommunications transmissions. She uses her second wish to get the slowly disintegrating Djinn to speak again, apologises for using her wish to deny them the chance to fall in love naturally, and uses her third and final wish to set the Djinn free, so he is able to return to 'The Realm of Djinn'. Though she never expects to see him again, the now-healthy Djinn visits Alithea three years later and periodically again afterwards throughout her lifetime, and the arrangement suits Alithea just fine. 

'Three Thousand Years of Longing' is Director George Miller's modern and more adult take on the more child friendly 'Aladdin' of old, and with it he has crafted a film of stunning set visuals, effects and cinematography, four compelling stories all woven into one neat package, of the power of storytelling, love, loss and hope for the future. The two leads in Swinton and Elba are spot on, and to see them riff off each other as they verbally spar with one another wearing nothing but white bathrobes in a hotel room is a joy to watch and helps keep the story grounded in the here and now. The final, after the pair return to London, feels a little rushed in an attempt to tie the whole story together and bring it to a satisfying conclusion, but that would only be a minor observation in a film that is greater than the sum of its parts. 

'Three Thousand Years of Longing' warrants four claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a potential five claps.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-